Free Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror by Erik Prince Page A

blown-open motor yacht; in the distance I saw debris raining down and the shards of a mast pinwheeling out of the sky.
    I could hear screaming. There were no cell phones at the time,and no radio in my boat to call for help. We cranked the forty-horsepower outboard motor my father and I had recently mounted in the Whaler, crouched low inside that robin’s egg blue hull, and zoomed toward the chaos.
    With the water spray whipping against my face, I thought about one of the first boating lessons my father had taught me:
Always ventilate!
Gas engines on board require particular attention, he’d emphasized—it’s different than with car engines. In automobiles, he’d said, the airflow under the vehicle blows away dangerous gas fumes. But there’s little natural ventilation through a bilge compartment, and even during a routine refuel, heavy gas fumes can pool there. If you don’t adequately ventilate those fumes, he said, you’ll literally create a bomb just waiting for a spark. I remembered reading in
Popular Mechanics
a few years earlier that one cup of gasoline had the same explosive power as a dozen sticks of dynamite. And there in the North Channel I figured I was about to see what that actually looked like.
    The Whaler cleared the half-mile distance to the accident in one minute flat. The damage to the motor yacht shocked me. The coach roof had been blown off, and there was a sickening hole by the bow. The deck was on fire.
    Two people, a woman who appeared to be in her seventies and a middle-aged woman I assumed was her daughter, had been catapulted from the boat. Unbelievably, they were alive, though the burns they had suffered, and the sounds of their pain, were evident before we could even pull alongside them. They struggled to stay afloat.
    Together, my friend and I hoisted each of them into the Whaler, laying the women across the wide wooden bench seats my father and I had spent so many hours sanding and revarnishing back in Michigan. To this day, I remember the smell of their burnt hair.
    Luckily for the women, as I cranked the Whaler into a U-turn and gunned it for shore, locals back on land who’d also seen the explosion were calling for the emergency personnel. The paramedics arrivedsoon after we reached the shore, and we helped load the women into the ambulances on stretchers. I never did learn their names, or what became of them. In fact, the last thing I remember about that morning was puttering back out to the Viking, tying off the Whaler, and climbing back on board with my family. Hardly anyone else was even awake yet.
    •   •   •
    “P erseverance and determination,” my father used to say. “Perseverance and determination.” It’s a mantra that defined his life. I hope it defines mine.
    As a child, my father accompanied his father, Peter, on his daily delivery route for Tulip City Produce Company around the scenic town of Holland, Michigan. My grandmother, Edith, was a seamstress. There, in the quiet town along the eastern edge of Lake Michigan, my father was taught to be industrious and to chip in with home improvement projects as soon as he could swing a hammer. When Peter died suddenly of a heart attack in 1943, my grandmother sought no government handouts, no charity from the church, not even money from family. Edgar, who had two sisters, was the man of the house now. He would provide for them. He was twelve.
    My father’s first job, for a local painter, paid him a few cents an hour to scrape and sand houses. That summer, when the hot water heater at home broke, he measured all the piping connections for the new appliance, walked to the hardware store, and had galvanized pipe cut and threaded. Piece by piece he installed the new water heater, no plumber necessary. There was no money to afford one, anyway.
    There were few stories of happy times from my father’s childhood. He never spoke of vacations to the beach, or family celebrations. He played high school football for only one